The Friday Thing
Musk v Trump. Arms and the Spirit in Denmark. Nazi stuff. Begun, the drone wars have. . .
Jun. 6 - It’s all about the Trump-Musk feud right now, isn’t it?
(Or is it the Musk-Trump feud? I suppose that’s a fight in itself.)
It’s the “Top Story” right now (Friday morning) according to Google:
It’s a perfect Friday thing kind of story: shallow, stupid, character-driven, and nevertheless important. When the wealthiest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world go head-to-head, everyone else had better run for cover.
I write this thing in dribs and drabs over the course of the day, so the state of play by the time I publish will almost certainly make any serious appraisal of this Top Story hopelessly outdated by the time it hit your inbox.
Any serious appraisal.
But who wants serious appraisals on Friday? (And it’s not just any Friday in Denmark: it’s a Friday before a long weekend.)
For those of us not on the left—I say it like that because a lot of the current MAGA coalition isn’t at all conservative in any usual sense of the word—for those of us who’ve been clinging to this weird Trump-Musk-Kennedy-Gabbard-Vance-Rubio coalition of misfit toys as the last best hope against the horrors toward which the international left had been steering us—for us, this is all very uncomfortable.
It’s not just that the two stalwarts of our movement have come to blows: it’s the sheer ugliness of it.
“The ‘big beautiful bill’ is an abomination!”
“You were just scamming the government for EV subsidies!”
“Yeah, well you’re on the Epstein client list!”
“Your little kid gave you a black eye!”
“You eat your boogers!”
“No, you eat your boogers!”
Blyech.
On CNN, the conservative commentator Scott Jennings expressed his own discomfort and compared it to seeing “mom and dad fighting.” He said Republicans across the nation would be having Pepto-Bismol nightcaps.
I disagree.
Psychologically, I think it’s like walking in on your parents going at it in bed: you love them both, you respect them both, somewhere deep in the back of a mental neighborhood you try to avoid you’ve even allowed yourself to acknowledge that they do these kinds of things (hence your existence)—but dear sweet lord you never wanted to see that. And now you can never unsee it. 1
(Apologies to any readers who were traumatized in this way as children and have now been sent back to that horror.)
The fight metaphor is more apt situationally, but the flagrante delicto metaphor gets straight to the sheer ick factor.
Patch it up, guys. We need you both—and you need each other.
And next time. . . get a room.
Meanwhile, in Denmark
Yesterday was Constitution Day in Denmark, so naturally enough the politicians were all out there speechifying.
The Prime Minister herself, Mette Frederiksen, gave her own Constitution Day speech at a school in southern Jutland. It included a call for “spiritual rearmament.”
According to Danmarks Radio (DR):
“We Danes need to rearm ourselves spiritually.”
That’s the message from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S) on Constitution Day.
“To strengthen our democracy and resilience as people and as a culture. Everything that enables us to have a common standpoint as a country and as a people.”
“Because if we’re not sure what we’re fighting for, where do we find the courage to stand firm if things go seriously wrong?” the Prime Minister says in her Constitution Day speech.
According to the PM, spiritual rearmament is, among other things, about “our democratic perspective, togetherness as people, and the ability to think critically and see through misinformation.”
Apart from the bit about togetherness (samhørighed), this is all boilerplate GLOB vocabulary for opposing populism—Joe Biden used almost identical phrasing to demonize Trump and his “semi-fascist” MAGA supporters: defend democracy! hold tight to our values! ignore the misinformation!—but in this new context it seems to be supporting a sort of populist nationalism.
I can’t help thinking of Chesterton’s critique of internationalism—which has, historically, been Frederiksen’s preferred point of view. From What I Saw in America:
And the normal man is almost always the national man. Patriotism is the most popular of all the virtues. The drier sort of democrats who despise it have the democracy against them in every country in the world. Hence their international efforts seldom go any farther than to effect an international reconciliation of all internationalists. But we have not solved the normal and popular problem until we have an international reconciliation of all nationalists.
That last sentence, the one I bolded, contains within it one of the keys to the great divide across the western world right now: it is “the normal man”—the national man—against “the drier sort of democrats” who fancy themselves globalists. Frederiksen’s speech yesterday, and other words and rumors of words around Europe lately, suggest that the globalists are beginning to grasp at the language of nationalists without understanding anything at all about the sentiment behind it.
The populist movements burgeoning across the west are all nationalist: everyone knows this.
Western progressives—the driest of “the drier sort”—associate nationalism with goosestepping Nazis and with Italians chanting for Il duce.
Such things aren’t representative of nationalism, but fanaticism.
The populist nationalists rising up across the western world right now aren’t fanatics. They’re ordinary men and women, citizens, who have already availed themselves of Frederiksen’s “spiritual rearmament.” They have been asserting their affection for their countries and their cultures for decades—and getting kicked in the teeth for it.
The Dane who says, “I love the Denmark I grew up in; my life is a good one, I am happy here, and I would like to keep Denmark Danish” has been routinely demonized by Frederiksen and her ilk as a racist, a xenophobe—as actually standing against the Denmark they believe in, which is some dog’s breakfast of globalized multicultural socialist hogswoggle.
And yet, as Chesterton wrote a century ago, the only real “globalism” that can ever succeed will come not from the top-down diktats of globalists, but a bottom-up reconciliation of nationalists.
Only a Dane who loves and understands Denmark will be able to forge mutually productive agreements with Germans who love Germany, Swedes who love Sweden, and Italians who love Italy.
What is loved by these men and women who want to subsume their countries, their homelands, into supranational organizations? Flip that around: how can anyone who seeks to subordinate their own country—their own customs, laws, and traditions—to internationalist organizations claim to love their country?
It’s absurd. It’s like saying, “I love my wife and therefore want the city council, the PTA, and the Elks to control her behavior.”
Again: the “spiritual rearmament” that Frederiksen seems to be advocating is already underway in Denmark—and she knows it, because she and her party have been opposing it from day èn.
I’d say “welcome to the party, pal,” except Mette Frederiksen doesn’t mean a word of it—she’s just changing tack to sail with the prevailing wind.
Which is the good news, I suppose: Denmark doesn’t need a spiritual rearmament, it just needs a government that doesn’t keep trying to block one.
Nazi Stuff
Today is the 81st anniversary of D-Day today—the beginning of the end of the second world war.
Trump was speaking with the German Chancellor yesterday and the subject came up.
Seems pretty banal, right? Merz uses the D-Day anniversary to segue into an appeal for leveraging more American pressure on Russia. Trump agrees with the historical reference and says yes, we’ll talk about the war in Ukraine.
But that’s not dramatic enough. So we get a lot of stuff like this, from the UK Independent:
The bizarre moment was not even the first example of questionable historical references to the Nazi and post-Hitler era from Trump, who also attempted to crack a joke about Merz’s efforts to push past decades of German pacifism to help bolster Ukraine’s defense and jump-start his country’s own arms industry.
Earlier in the article the “bizarre [and historically questionable] moment” is described like this:
“I'm here, Mr. President, to talk with you later on on how we could contribute to that goal. And we all are looking for measures and for instruments to bring this terror war to an end. And may I remind you that we are having June 6 tomorrow. This is D-Day anniversary when the Americans once ended a war in Europe,” (Merz) said.
At that point, Trump interjected, seemingly wisecracking to Merz: “That was not a pleasant day for you.”
The chancellor began to reply that it was “not a pleasant day” before stopping himself and delivering a bit of a history lesson for his U.S. counterpart.
“In the long run, Mr. President, this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship,” he corrected.
That’s “a history lesson?”
For god’s sake, Trump was like, “yeah, D-Day was a bad day for you guys.” Meaning Germany. Which it was: it turned the tide of the war and Germany was on the defensive from June 6, 1944, until the bitter end.
And as you can see in the video, and as the Independent notes itself, Merz was on the brink of agreeing when he suddenly realized the “you” Trump was talking about was not the happy shiny pacifist green multi-culti Germany of today, but the Nazi war machine of the 40s.
If anyone needed a history lesson, it wasn’t Trump but Merz.
Germany wasn’t liberated from an occupying force. It was conquered and then occupied by its military enemies. The allies had to kill a lot of Germans to reach Berlin. The Nazis hadn’t invaded Germany: they were Germany. I understand the German desire to get out from under their heinous history, but they shouldn’t be allowed to do so by implying that, “by golly, we were all just sitting around making Edelweiss bouquets, drinking beer, eating pretzels, and engineering things, when suddenly these Nazis invaded our land and subjugated our people!”
Your circus, Mr. Merz. Your clowns. We know you’re not a Nazi, we know the German people of today are not Nazis, but the Nazis were a German phenomenon supported by the German people of their day.
I know, I know: you’re thinking, let it go, moron, it’s a little thing.
But here’s how the Independent opens their piece:
A meeting between President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took an awkward turn on Thursday when he suggested that Germans might not view the anniversary of D-Day — commemorating the U.S.-led invasion of Europe that was the beginning of the end for the Nazis — in a favorable light.
Is that an accurate characterization of what you saw in that video?
And look how Google News prioritized coverage:
Story #1: TRUMP IMPLIES MERZ REGRETS NAZI DEFEAT!
Story #4: Merz very happy about the meeting.
Garbage media.
Garbage Google.
One if by land, two if by sea, three if from land, sea, and air, everywhere, all at once
The history of warfare changed on Sunday. If you sniff around military blogs, that’s just about all they’re talking about. See, for example, this Substack by Cdr Salamander:
The future of warfare is easy to see. Within 10-15 years, battlespaces and the enemy’s fixed military assets and defensive infrastructure will be taken out by drones. Once the battlespace is neutralized, rockets will move 1000s of troops into position, from anywhere to anywhere, in a matter of hours. Those troops will be equipped and backed up with still more drones, and, inevitably, robotic warriors: robot dogs, robot spiders, robot humanoids, nanobots, all of them with AI operating systems, and all of them heavily armed.
I said 10-15 years. Maybe it’s a little longer than that, maybe circumstances force it upon us a little quicker. The thing is: if we’re not rejiggering our entire defense posture with this vision in mind, we’re absolutely fucked in the future.
So I’m glad the military bloggers are lit up over this—I just hope the Top Men in Washington are in the loop.
Dept. of ICYMI
Monday’s Almanac was mostly about June, freemasonry, and Pancho Villa. Also a surprising amount about the Treaty of Tordesillas, and a vintage video of Dr. Ruth throwing David Letterman off balance.
Also on Monday, I got personal with reflections on our trip to France in "Paris Ramble.” (Not icky saccharine or TMI personal, more wryly reflective.)
On Tuesday, “Now That the Intifada Has Been Globalized” was about the troubling new hotness (that isn’t really new) of killing all the Jews. . . and what to do about it.
And on Wednesday, “Big, yes. But beautiful. . .?” used the Celebrated Swollen Bill of the Potomac as a jumping off point for an examination of everything wrong with America’s current legislative process—with a helpful case study examining the “Save the Puppies” bill.
Have a great weekend!